TEITANBLOOD - THE BANEFUL CHOIR (listening guide)

0. Introduction

The release of Teitanblood’s third album once again represented a new twist in the band’s sound. Seven Chalices (2009) was one of the best debut albums in the history of extreme metal. Its impact on the scene was enormous, and its influence has only continued to grow. The colossal ambition of Seven Chalices generated several escape points that can be summarized as follows:

- The consolidation of Blackened Death and War Metal during the last fifteen years.

- Its contribution to Old School Death Metal (with a proposal both avant-garde and reverent toward the past), in which the importance of sound stood out for a more textural and atmospheric approach — the first step of modern Death Metal toward the deterritorialization of extreme metal, its drift toward abstraction.

- It unleashed Death Metal from its limitations regarding formal complexity and compositional length, endowing it with unrestrained ambition and an unprecedented conceptual and lyrical depth (following the emergent vector of Deathspell Omega).

Death (2014) marked a change, as all forces centered on the invocation of the irrational and madness to push the band’s sound to unparalleled levels of dementia: abstraction and deterritorialization are here imposed through the hyperdensity of ideas and elements that drive the music into a state close to vaporization.

Ultimately, both albums revolutionized extreme metal in this century, dissolving borders, cracking limits, and opening paths toward the unknown.

At this point, the band decided to open a new approach with The Baneful Choir (2019). The compositions reduce their length and complexity, steering the music toward a more mechanical and textural sound. The number of riffs per song is drastically reduced (the title track The Baneful Choir itself contains only one riff!!) so that density and intensity are achieved through minimalist repetition and trance. This aspect, which was always essential to the band’s sound, is here pushed to the extreme, forcing us to focus on atmosphere and sound above all other elements.

The vocals contribute enormously to this goal. After the more direct and “traditional” approach of Death, we again find NSK incredibly creative, driving the vocals to a state of maximum sickness through abstraction in phrasing and the use of multiple effects and layers, resulting in something truly disturbing.

The songs become shorter, but not because the band renounces density — rather, they condense it into oppressive, repetitive, and brutal sound forms.

NSK offers a precise synthesis of each album’s intent:

“… my approach to music – always keeping in mind a large-scale vision of the atmosphere I’m hoping to convey… be it the abrasive occult filth of Seven Chalices, the impenitent relentless insanity of Death, or the nightmarish mechanical oppression of The Baneful Choir.”

(Bardo Methodology, VI, p. 55 or https://www.bardomethodology.com/articles/2021/01/20/teitanblood-baneful-choir-interview/)

Thus, The Baneful Choir represents the most evident application of what musicologist Razalas defines as “zones of indiscernibility”:

“spaces where one can no longer distinguish between riff and texture, between atmosphere and rhythmic impulse, between form and noise. (…) A space is generated where elements are no longer functional, but presences — abstract forces.”

Next, we will analyze the most significant moments of 

The Baneful Choir

1. Rapture Below

0:00 CG Santos deploys his dark arts to develop a circular structure, using sounds created through modular synthesis. Several perfectly assembled layers, slowed and reversed voices, and emerging and vanishing textural strata immerse us in an ominous atmosphere of an alchemical laboratory.

2:35 The tension begins to rise, leading to 3:02 with the appearance of the first guitars and drum hits, while the choir grows in the background and drives us toward…

2. Black Vertebrae

0:00 The track opens with a slow rhythm in the style of Celtic Frost, with sharp guitars intoning a funereal lament.

0:37 J quickly introduces variations on the drums with exquisite use of cymbals and a performance full of nuances that he will maintain throughout the album.

1:13 The riff shifts into tremolo while the drums gradually increase the tension.

1:45 The first solo appears, where we can appreciate the development of J. Felez’s style on this album, with a more classic and tonal focus.

2:20 The first tension build-up arrives in pure Teitanblood fashion — incendiary solos with bendings and whammy bar abuse, joined by an increase in vocal layering and a more complex, overloaded drum pattern.

2:57 Thematic material develops with the introduction of a Slayer-style riff featuring a wide array of arrangements, novel within the band’s style and handled by J. Felez. NSK still remains lurking. Minimalism and resource economy reach their peak, yet with an extremely intricate textural web. Multum in parvo, which will be this album’s motto in contrast to the unrestrained excess we witnessed in Death.

3. Leprous Fire

0:00 The first blast beat of the album is finally unleashed, and aggression explodes (a battle of solos) pushing the tremolo riffs that form the first thematic block. The voice finally awakens, rising to the foreground. The succession of solos continues, this time by NSK, with his more textural and atonal approach.

1:33 A tempo change arrives with a block of deeper and starker riffs where the drums will impose shifts in pulse and intensity.

2:58 A spectacular passage appears where a riff (serving as a bridge) is exposed and then accelerated in a demented way to return to the previous thematic block. The importance of these pulse changes must be emphasized — a true tribute to a classic way of creating extreme metal that has almost completely vanished.

4:04 Outro by CG Santos, minimalist and psychedelic.

4. Ungodly Others

0:00 Spectacular thematic shift as the riffs move from a more death-like (deep and atonal) aesthetic toward a more thrash and classic approach. The complexity increases with the typical succession of vocal sections driven by higher percussive density and vertiginous guitar solos.

2:16 Return to the first riff. Subtle changes in the drums stand out, making each repetition of the riff different from the previous ones.

2:42 We enter the block of riffs leading to the end of the track: deeper riffs with a slower tempo in the vein of classic Death Metal, where constant variations dominate within a structure much more complex than it appears.

5. Inhuman Utterings

0:00 Exposition of tremolo riffs for the introduction of the track, where flashes of thrash metal accompany the prevailing death aesthetic.

1:39 Bridge full of solos with increasing drum intensity and continuous cymbal arrangements, enriching an already dense discourse. The rate of new riff introduction accelerates, presented rapidly and without pause in the style of Death, extending the rhizomatic form.

4:15 Re-exposition of material, though with the expected changes provided by the percussion, which dominates the outro at 5:20.

6:05 CG Santos performs the transition to the interlude track:

6. Insight

The next three tracks will be of supreme importance for understanding the inner and hidden structure of the album. CG Santos here provokes a sonic fold within the record. Cracks open that connect the beginning and the end through resources already used and that will be used again in a track whose function is more complex than it seems, since there is a play of mirrors — a delirious specular structure that plunges us into the B-side of the album, where we no longer know whether we are moving forward or backward.

7. ...of the Mad Men

A pause marks that fold: the music curves and folds in on itself until it turns inside out, superimposing over what has already been heard. Interzone, liminal passages, the codes collapse only to reassemble again…

8. The Baneful Choir

0:00 CG Santos prepares, with his modular synths, the exposition of perhaps the album’s most extreme riff, due to its unbearable primitivism — an austerity of four notes that perfectly opens a wormhole connecting with those classic and primal death and black riffs from the genre’s origins, four notes to concentrate all possible evil, four notes that will repeat relentlessly and mercilessly, dragging us into an altered, purely psychedelic mental state: BLACK METAL DEATH MAGIC… TOMB VEIN KHEM RITE...

1:32 The guitar notes begin to replace the synthesizers, and the texture becomes increasingly oppressive.

2:28 Everything turns low and heavy; the mechanism activates to reach the essence of The Baneful Choir. The album devours itself, plunging into a feverish and hallucinatory spiral where each repetition is at once the same and different: voices surge and disappear, textural waves emerge and recede, and the drums are subjected to slow but continuous variations under the force of the vortex. We rotate endlessly, witnessing the Maelstrom alongside Poe, our minds subjected to pure irrationality. The riff as the ultimate loop-weapon — one that can only be stopped in a single way...

7:35 CG Santos plunges us, with brutal abruptness, through an imperceptible fissure that returns us to the dreamlike, calm, and disorienting atmosphere of the beginning, as if everything experienced had never occurred.

9. Sunken Stars

0:00 A blast beat rescues us from our stupor, forcing us back into motion, traveling through multiple riffs that pierce our exhausted minds without resistance. The battle between vocals and guitar solos returns, within a feverish discourse that advances mercilessly without offering any respite.

1:57 J once again introduces resource variations through rhythmic cymbal patterns, exposed as pillars sustaining the rhizomatic structure of this track, with connections at 2:20 and 4:35. This symbiotic relationship between complex drumming accent patterns as a response to the maximalist minimalism of the riffs — developed throughout the album — reaches its climax here.

5:43 CG Santos once again acts as alchemical master, stopping the feverish wheel that moves forward and will have one final onslaught:

10. Verdict of the Dead

0:00 With Verdict of the Dead we return to an atmosphere of classic death and thrash in the vein of Slayer — and it happens here more evidently than anywhere else on the album. Incantation-like riffs alternate with the most aggressive Slayer forms. In a discourse once again complex and feverish, with constant changes and an enormous number of riffs exposed in a short span of time,

3:44 There is even space for the Autopsy tribute riff (a moment that no Teitanblood album avoids), including the most classic solos of the entire record — tonal and purist licks by J. Felez.

4:05 We enter a brief exposition of new material serving as the outro, quickly taken over by CG Santos to make the transition toward:

11. Charnel Above

As above, below — but inverted. The complex conceptual narrative exposed by Teitanblood on this album leads us to reinterpret this primal, atavistic mantra that marked the beginning of humankind’s relationship with the gods in the deep past.

CG Santos unfolds his resources in an absolutely masterful way, and the funereal choir emerges, at first with distant solemnity and later increasing tension (2:53), until the album ends as it began — after having been folded and inverted along a Möbius strip that we already know can only lead to madness. The record turns over, begins to spin again, and the infinite loop in which we are submerged welcomes us once more along its path of imperturbable inevitability.